Localization of partial electrical discharges using compressive spherical frequency-difference beamforming

Accurate localization of partial electrical discharges is essential for the diagnosis of high-voltage systems. The current study achieves this by employing an acoustic sensor array and a beamforming approach. The occurrence of a partial discharge is accompanied by the emission of high-frequency sounds in the ultrasonic range, making localization a challenging task requiring many sensors to avoid spatial aliasing. Compressive frequency-difference beamforming, as previously proposed, can be effective in addressing this issue. We expand the method to include near-field localization by utilizing a spherical wave and propose a two-step normalization process. This eliminates the bias associated with nonplanar waves and standardizes the field variables, thereby preserving only the phase and relative amplitude information. A distributed algorithm based on the alternating direction multiplier method is used to solve the associated convex optimization problem. The proposed method is demonstrated using simulated and experimental data.